Distinctiveness effect due to contextual information in a categorization task Warning The content... more Distinctiveness effect due to contextual information in a categorization task Warning The contents of this site is subject to the French law on intellectual property and is the exclusive property of the publisher. The works on this site can be accessed and reproduced on paper or digital media, provided that they are strictly used for personal, scientific or educational purposes excluding any commercial exploitation. Reproduction must necessarily mention the editor, the journal name, the author and the document reference. Any other reproduction is strictly forbidden without permission of the publisher, except in cases provided by legislation
Le travail de recherche presente dans ce livre considere la memoire humaine comme un systeme uniq... more Le travail de recherche presente dans ce livre considere la memoire humaine comme un systeme unique et non abstractif qui reflete l''ensemble de nos experiences sous forme de traces episodiques multimodales. L''objectif de cette recherche est de montrer qu''un effet robuste de la memoire humaine, l''effet de distinctivite, peut emerger aussi bien dans les tâches implicites que dans les tâches explicites de memoire et que cet effet s''expliquerait en termes de mecanismes specifiques (activation et integration multimodales) et non pas en termes de systemes mnesiques sous-jacents. Dans ce travail, nous avons realise trois series d''experiences comportementales sur des sujets adultes. Nos resultats experimentaux suggerent que les performances issues des tâches implicites et explicites de memoire peuvent etre expliquees au sein du meme systeme mnesique unique. Ainsi, les processus d''integration seraient a l''origine de ce p...
Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. ... more Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. Accordingly, one of the current research objectives is to identify the processes associated with this harmful habit. Although numerous studies have underlined the role of executive and motivational processes, few have explored emotional and interpersonal abilities at early steps of alcohol abuse. The present study evaluated the role of two social cognition processes, namely theory of mind (ability to infer others’ mental states at cognitive and affective levels) and empathy (ability to understand others’ feelings at cognitive and affective levels) in adolescents’ alcohol consumption. Two hundred and two adolescents (13-20 years old) performed a behavioral task evaluating theory of mind and filled in questionnaires measuring personal data, empathy, alcohol consumption (alcohol abuse and specific binge drinking), as well as depressive and anxiety symptoms. Findings showed that cognitive and affective empathy were negatively associated with alcohol consumption in youth whereas affective theory of mind was related to specific binge drinking. Importantly, affective theory of mind predicted binge drinking in adolescents, even after controlling for age, gender, and education level. These results emphasized the role of social cognition in early alcohol abuse and showed that, beyond inhibition, interpersonal abilities might precipitate excessive drinking in youth.
Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases.... more Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases. These impairments may lead to a deficit in recognizing helping intentions of others. To investigate recognition of help, we designed a card-guessing game (Virtual Help Recognition Paradigm) involving two successive virtual agents asking questions to the participant at different moments of the game. These questions were either empathetic (i.e. on the subject's feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game). We assessed how much the participant felt that the virtual agent had helped him and, her attitude and personality traits. We measured how much the participant trusted the virtual agent with a monetary allocation procedure. Twenty individuals with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were recruited. The controls' ratings demonstrated that they interpreted empathetic questioning as helping and rewarded it positively with an increased monetary allocation. Participants with schizophrenia had a reduced perception of the differences between the two agents. Only the rating concerning the "interest/attention" of the agent toward these participants yielded significant differences among conditions. Hypothetically, individuals with schizophrenia take into account the fact they are the object of another's attention, but may fail to infer a helping intention and to behave accordingly.
Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases.... more Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases. These impairments may lead to a deficit in recognizing helping intentions of others. To investigate recognition of help, we designed a card-guessing game (Virtual Help Recognition Paradigm) involving two successive virtual agents asking questions to the participant at different moments of the game. These questions were either empathetic (i.e. on the subject's feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game). We assessed how much the participant felt that the virtual agent had helped him and, her attitude and personality traits. We measured how much the participant trusted the virtual agent with a monetary allocation procedure. Twenty individuals with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were recruited. The controls' ratings demonstrated that they interpreted empathetic questioning as helping and rewarded it positively with an increased monetary allocation. Participants with schizophrenia had a reduced perception of the differences between the two agents. Only the rating concerning the "interest/attention" of the agent toward these participants yielded significant differences among conditions. Hypothetically, individuals with schizophrenia take into account the fact they are the object of another's attention, but may fail to infer a helping intention and to behave accordingly.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2021
Previous research has highlighted age-related differences in social perception, in particular emo... more Previous research has highlighted age-related differences in social perception, in particular emotional expression processing. To date, such studies have largely focused on approaches that use static emotional stimuli that the participant has to identify passively without the possibility of any interaction. In this study, we propose an interactive virtual environment to better address age-related variations in social and emotional perception. A group of 22 young (18–30 years) and 20 older (60–80 years) adults were engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an embodied conversational agent. Participants were invited to interact naturally with the agent and to identify his facial expression. Their gaze behaviour was captured by an eye-tracking device throughout the interaction. We also explored whether the Big Five personality traits (particularly extraversion) and anxiety modulated gaze during the social interaction. Findings suggested that age-related differences in gaze behaviour were only apparent when decoding social signals (i.e., listening to a partner’s question, identifying facial expressions) and not when communicating social information (i.e., when speaking). Furthermore, higher extraversion levels consistently led to a shorter amount of time gazing towards the eyes, whereas higher anxiety levels led to slight modulations of gaze only when participants were listening to questions. Face-to-face conversation with virtual agents can provide a more naturalistic framework for the assessment of online socio-emotional interaction in older adults, which is not easily observable in classical offline paradigms. This study provides novel and important insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may experience difficulties in social interactions.
Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children ... more Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils' motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9-11 years. Children performed several numeracy exercises set by two different virtual agents. One agent provided solely verbal feedback (unimodal), while the other one combined facial expressions based on real muscle contractions with its verbal feedback (bimodal). Children then completed a perceived social support questionnaire. Qualitative and quantitative data were subjected to inferential statistical tests. Results showed that the overall duration of agent-pupil interactions varied, children found the bimodal agent more empathic, and produced significantly more correct answers. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between accuracy and mean reaction times for correct answers with the bimodal agent. The lack of a correlation for the unimodal agent is discussed in the light of empathy and motivation in social cognition.
Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children ... more Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils' motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9-11 years. Children performed several numeracy exercises set by two different virtual agents. One agent provided solely verbal feedback (unimodal), while the other one combined facial expressions based on real muscle contractions with its verbal feedback (bimodal). Children then completed a perceived social support questionnaire. Qualitative and quantitative data were subjected to inferential statistical tests. Results showed that the overall duration of agent-pupil interactions varied, children found the bimodal agent more empathic, and produced significantly more correct answers. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between accuracy and mean reaction times for correct answers with the bimodal agent. The lack of a correlation for the unimodal agent is discussed in the light of empathy and motivation in social cognition.
Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies.... more Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. Accordingly, one of the current research objectives is to identify the processes associated with this harmful habit. Although numerous studies have underlined the role of executive and motivational processes, few have explored emotional and interpersonal abilities at early steps of alcohol abuse. The present study evaluated the role of two social cognition processes, namely theory of mind (ability to infer others’ mental states at cognitive and affective levels) and empathy (ability to understand others’ feelings at cognitive and affective levels) in adolescents’ alcohol consumption. Two hundred and two adolescents (13-20 years old) performed a behavioral task evaluating theory of mind and filled in questionnaires measuring personal data, empathy, alcohol consumption (alcohol abuse and specific binge drinking), as well as depressive and anxiety symptoms. Findings showed that cognitive and affective empathy were negatively associated with alcohol consumption in youth whereas affective theory of mind was related to specific binge drinking. Importantly, affective theory of mind predicted binge drinking in adolescents, even after controlling for age, gender, and education level. These results emphasized the role of social cognition in early alcohol abuse and showed that, beyond inhibition, interpersonal abilities might precipitate excessive drinking in youth.
It is now largely accepted that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit to attribute mental st... more It is now largely accepted that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit to attribute mental states to others, such as intentions, needs and motivations but also to perform memory tasks. According to one hypothesis, these impairments may be due to an early visual attention deficit during the encounter of social stimuli. Another hypothesis posits a robust correlation between intention attribution and autobiographical memory that results in impaired recollection of past events making it difficult to infer others' intentions. In sum, the link between intention attribution and encoding process is yet to be explored in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the present study is to contribute to this debate by investigating whether schizophrenic patients' recollection can be boosted by an attentional cueing on relevant information and to determine the influence of two different situational contexts: attribution of intentions or physical causality scripts. By using a supraliminal attentional cue, we made relevant areas of our material more salient across two conditions: attribution of intentions (AI) and physical causality with human characters (PCCH). The results confirmed expected deficit of explicit memory in schizophrenia patients while attentional cueing on relevant areas for intentions attribution or physical causality had no effect on recollection in any group. However, it seems that the recollection performances are highly influenced by the nature of intentions attribution. Also, it is the first time that the material used for the assessment of theory of mind performances has been tested with a recognition test.
With regards to the neurocognitive deficits and cognitive bias of schizophrenic disorders, it may... more With regards to the neurocognitive deficits and cognitive bias of schizophrenic disorders, it may be hypothesized that these patients suffer a deficit in recognizing helping intentions in others. To inves- tigate help recognition, new technologies allowing to control an interaction with virtual affective agents were used with an adap- tation of a previously described card-guessing paradigm (project COMPARSE ANR-11-EMCO-0007). We investigated whether the same game proposed successively by two virtual agents asking either empathetic (i.e. on the subject’s feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game) questions to the participant would elicit different interpretations on their intentions. Depend- ent variables consisted of monetary allocation to the virtual agent, of questionnaires assessing the agent’s help, interest, attention, etc. A group of 20 individuals with schizophrenia and one of 20 healthy controls, matched on gender, with comparable age, esti- mated verbal-IQ and educational level were recruited.
La pratique psychiatrique est amenée à intégrer de plus en plus de moyens spécialisés d'évaluati... more La pratique psychiatrique est amenée à intégrer de plus en plus de moyens spécialisés d'évaluation des capacités cognitives des patients schizophrènes. Évaluer ces facultés revêt un intérêt tout particulier du fait de leurs corrélations significatives, même par-tielles, avec le pronostic fonctionnel, autrement dit le handicap. De plus, les mesures des capacités cognitives sont directement en lien avec les moyens de remédiation cognitive dont l'intérêt thérapeutique est établi. En tant que domaine particulier du trai-tement de l'information, un nombre croissant de travaux a mis en lumière les spécificités neurofonctionnelles des processus permet-tant de comprendre les états mentaux et affectifs d'autrui. Sous les intitulés de reconnaissance émotionnelle, perception sociale, représentations partagées, prise de perspective, théorie de l'esprit, ou empathie sont identifiés des processus et des représentations dont la faillite impacte les capacités relationnelles des patients. Au stade actuel des connaissances, il n'existe pas de consensus sur les moyens de mesure pertinents et leur éventuelle hiérar-chisation à des fins cliniques. Des propositions de batterie sont en cours d'évaluation et de déploiement. Pour aller plus avant, à l'encontre du réductionnisme scientifique prédominant, nous développons ici l'idée qu'aux côtés des évaluations fondées sur des mesures de construits cognitifs sociaux distincts et validés par les neurosciences sociales, de nouvelles méthodes sont à conce-voir pour tester les capacités d'interaction sociale. Une approche « naturalistique » fondée sur la multi-modalité, la contextualisation et la mise en situation est rendue possible avec le développement des techniques de réalité virtuelle. Celles-ci constituent une voie prometteuse pour concilier deux besoins scientifiques apparem-ment contradictoires : d'une part, le besoin de complexifier les stimuli sociaux en les rendant réalistes, interactifs, partiellement prévisibles, et immersifs, et d'autre part, le besoin d'assurer la répli-cabilité et la standardisation des mesures. Notre propos s'appuiera sur les résultats à mi-parcours du projet ANR COMPARSE.
Augmented feedback has been shown to improve interaction in virtual environments and to facilitat... more Augmented feedback has been shown to improve interaction in virtual environments and to facilitate motor learn- ing. Recent studies proposed this type of feedback to guide users, to highlight specific areas or to help them to perform a specific task. They can follow a path, pass through specific waypoints or even mimic an avatar. However these approaches do not show the gap between learners’ performance and the desired one. Our hypothesis is that by revealing this gap to the users, they will reduce it step by step and tend to the required performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new visual metaphor to guide trainees’ gestures by showing trajectory errors instead of showing the path to follow. In a first study we evaluated trainees’ improvement by measuring the mentioned gap. First results indicate that our approach allows an enhanced task performance. Keywords—Virtual reality, visual feedback, guidance, gestures
The present topic emphasizes the parallel development of concepts in social neurosciences and in ... more The present topic emphasizes the parallel development of concepts in social neurosciences and in other domains such as computer science, affective computing, virtual reality development, and even hardware technologies. While several researchers in neurosciences pointed out the necessity to consider naturalistic social cognition (Zaki and Ochsner, 2009), the second person perspective (Schilbach et al., 2013), social interaction (Pfeiffer et al.) and reciprocity (de Bruin et al.), both computer and software developments allowed more and more realistic real-time models of our environment and of virtual humans capable of some interaction with users. A new convergence between scientific disciplines might occur from which it is tricky to predict the outcomes in terms of new concepts, methods, and uses. Although this convergence meets ongoing societal changes (increasing social demands on computer technologies, augmenting funding), it comes with several difficulties for which the current Frontiers in' topic strives to bring some positive answers, and to provide both theoretical arguments and experimental examples. The first problem was about concepts and vocabulary as contributions described in the following were authored by neuroscientists, computer scientists, psychopathologists, each coming with separate knowledge, and key literature. A special attention was given to avoid purely technical descriptions and to focus on the added value of virtual reality in neurosciences and psychopathology. Another problem concerned methods: more complex computerized interaction models results in unpredictable and poorly controlled experiments. In other words, the assets of naturalistic paradigms may be alleviated by the difficulty to match results between subjects, populations, and conditions. It is crucial to consider this question when investigating pathologies that are associated with profoundly divergent behavioral patterns. The last issue we encountered was about heterogeneity of the objectives of the researches presented here. While selection criteria focused on the use of innovative technologies to assess or improve social cognition, the fields of application of this approach were quite unexpected. The first group of contributions exemplifies how innovation in methods improves understanding and assessment of social cognition disorders or pathology. Timmermans and Schilbach provide technological orientations for investigating alterations of social interaction in
The need for experimentation of facial expression recognition in a more ecological manner necessi... more The need for experimentation of facial expression recognition in a more ecological manner necessitates the use of multimodal, interactive experimental stimuli. At the same time, the prerequisite of reproducibility of results and controlled conditions is still mandatory. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) is a pertinent framework that meets all these requirements. The VIB (Virtual Interactive Behavior) Platform is a SAIBA compliant system which supports the real-time generation of multimodal behavior for interacting with socio-emotional virtual agents. We created a new feature for this platform, namely VIB-Ex, which can be used for presenting real-time facial expressions and recording the user's reaction time and interaction while exporting data for statistical purposes. In this paper, we present our proof of concept study in which a 3D male virtual character has been used to convey joyful or sad facial expressions. At the same time, the same character pronounced joyful or sad words in congruence or incongruence with its facial expression in order to trigger an emotional Stroop effect. Only 12 adults were sufficient in order to obtain an emotional Stroop effect within our virtual agent. The results of this study confirmed that the VIB-Ex platform can replicate a robust effect of psychological phenomena concerning recognition of facial expressions. VIB-Ex proves itself to be a suitable and a pertinent tool to perform experiments on a human's automatic process of facial expression recognition. Finally, we discuss the possible future research topics with VIB-Ex to carry out other type of experiments in the field of social cognition.
Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases.... more Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases. These impairments may lead to a deficit in recognizing helping intentions of others. To investigate recognition of help, we designed a card-guessing game (Virtual Help Recognition Paradigm) involving two successive virtual agents asking questions to the participant at different moments of the game. These questions were either empathetic (i.e. on the subject's feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game). We assessed how much the participant felt that the virtual agent had helped him and, her attitude and personality traits. We measured how much the participant trusted the virtual agent with a monetary allocation procedure. Twenty individuals with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were recruited. The controls' ratings demonstrated that they interpreted empathetic questioning as helping and rewarded it positively with an increased monetary allocation. Participants with schizophrenia had a reduced perception of the differences between the two agents. Only the rating concerning the " interest/ attention " of the agent toward these participants yielded significant differences among conditions. Hypothetically , individuals with schizophrenia take into account the fact they are the object of another's attention, but may fail to infer a helping intention and to behave accordingly.
Distinctiveness effect due to contextual information in a categorization task Warning The content... more Distinctiveness effect due to contextual information in a categorization task Warning The contents of this site is subject to the French law on intellectual property and is the exclusive property of the publisher. The works on this site can be accessed and reproduced on paper or digital media, provided that they are strictly used for personal, scientific or educational purposes excluding any commercial exploitation. Reproduction must necessarily mention the editor, the journal name, the author and the document reference. Any other reproduction is strictly forbidden without permission of the publisher, except in cases provided by legislation
Le travail de recherche presente dans ce livre considere la memoire humaine comme un systeme uniq... more Le travail de recherche presente dans ce livre considere la memoire humaine comme un systeme unique et non abstractif qui reflete l''ensemble de nos experiences sous forme de traces episodiques multimodales. L''objectif de cette recherche est de montrer qu''un effet robuste de la memoire humaine, l''effet de distinctivite, peut emerger aussi bien dans les tâches implicites que dans les tâches explicites de memoire et que cet effet s''expliquerait en termes de mecanismes specifiques (activation et integration multimodales) et non pas en termes de systemes mnesiques sous-jacents. Dans ce travail, nous avons realise trois series d''experiences comportementales sur des sujets adultes. Nos resultats experimentaux suggerent que les performances issues des tâches implicites et explicites de memoire peuvent etre expliquees au sein du meme systeme mnesique unique. Ainsi, les processus d''integration seraient a l''origine de ce p...
Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. ... more Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. Accordingly, one of the current research objectives is to identify the processes associated with this harmful habit. Although numerous studies have underlined the role of executive and motivational processes, few have explored emotional and interpersonal abilities at early steps of alcohol abuse. The present study evaluated the role of two social cognition processes, namely theory of mind (ability to infer others’ mental states at cognitive and affective levels) and empathy (ability to understand others’ feelings at cognitive and affective levels) in adolescents’ alcohol consumption. Two hundred and two adolescents (13-20 years old) performed a behavioral task evaluating theory of mind and filled in questionnaires measuring personal data, empathy, alcohol consumption (alcohol abuse and specific binge drinking), as well as depressive and anxiety symptoms. Findings showed that cognitive and affective empathy were negatively associated with alcohol consumption in youth whereas affective theory of mind was related to specific binge drinking. Importantly, affective theory of mind predicted binge drinking in adolescents, even after controlling for age, gender, and education level. These results emphasized the role of social cognition in early alcohol abuse and showed that, beyond inhibition, interpersonal abilities might precipitate excessive drinking in youth.
Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases.... more Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases. These impairments may lead to a deficit in recognizing helping intentions of others. To investigate recognition of help, we designed a card-guessing game (Virtual Help Recognition Paradigm) involving two successive virtual agents asking questions to the participant at different moments of the game. These questions were either empathetic (i.e. on the subject's feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game). We assessed how much the participant felt that the virtual agent had helped him and, her attitude and personality traits. We measured how much the participant trusted the virtual agent with a monetary allocation procedure. Twenty individuals with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were recruited. The controls' ratings demonstrated that they interpreted empathetic questioning as helping and rewarded it positively with an increased monetary allocation. Participants with schizophrenia had a reduced perception of the differences between the two agents. Only the rating concerning the "interest/attention" of the agent toward these participants yielded significant differences among conditions. Hypothetically, individuals with schizophrenia take into account the fact they are the object of another's attention, but may fail to infer a helping intention and to behave accordingly.
Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases.... more Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases. These impairments may lead to a deficit in recognizing helping intentions of others. To investigate recognition of help, we designed a card-guessing game (Virtual Help Recognition Paradigm) involving two successive virtual agents asking questions to the participant at different moments of the game. These questions were either empathetic (i.e. on the subject's feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game). We assessed how much the participant felt that the virtual agent had helped him and, her attitude and personality traits. We measured how much the participant trusted the virtual agent with a monetary allocation procedure. Twenty individuals with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were recruited. The controls' ratings demonstrated that they interpreted empathetic questioning as helping and rewarded it positively with an increased monetary allocation. Participants with schizophrenia had a reduced perception of the differences between the two agents. Only the rating concerning the "interest/attention" of the agent toward these participants yielded significant differences among conditions. Hypothetically, individuals with schizophrenia take into account the fact they are the object of another's attention, but may fail to infer a helping intention and to behave accordingly.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2021
Previous research has highlighted age-related differences in social perception, in particular emo... more Previous research has highlighted age-related differences in social perception, in particular emotional expression processing. To date, such studies have largely focused on approaches that use static emotional stimuli that the participant has to identify passively without the possibility of any interaction. In this study, we propose an interactive virtual environment to better address age-related variations in social and emotional perception. A group of 22 young (18–30 years) and 20 older (60–80 years) adults were engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an embodied conversational agent. Participants were invited to interact naturally with the agent and to identify his facial expression. Their gaze behaviour was captured by an eye-tracking device throughout the interaction. We also explored whether the Big Five personality traits (particularly extraversion) and anxiety modulated gaze during the social interaction. Findings suggested that age-related differences in gaze behaviour were only apparent when decoding social signals (i.e., listening to a partner’s question, identifying facial expressions) and not when communicating social information (i.e., when speaking). Furthermore, higher extraversion levels consistently led to a shorter amount of time gazing towards the eyes, whereas higher anxiety levels led to slight modulations of gaze only when participants were listening to questions. Face-to-face conversation with virtual agents can provide a more naturalistic framework for the assessment of online socio-emotional interaction in older adults, which is not easily observable in classical offline paradigms. This study provides novel and important insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may experience difficulties in social interactions.
Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children ... more Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils' motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9-11 years. Children performed several numeracy exercises set by two different virtual agents. One agent provided solely verbal feedback (unimodal), while the other one combined facial expressions based on real muscle contractions with its verbal feedback (bimodal). Children then completed a perceived social support questionnaire. Qualitative and quantitative data were subjected to inferential statistical tests. Results showed that the overall duration of agent-pupil interactions varied, children found the bimodal agent more empathic, and produced significantly more correct answers. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between accuracy and mean reaction times for correct answers with the bimodal agent. The lack of a correlation for the unimodal agent is discussed in the light of empathy and motivation in social cognition.
Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children ... more Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils' motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9-11 years. Children performed several numeracy exercises set by two different virtual agents. One agent provided solely verbal feedback (unimodal), while the other one combined facial expressions based on real muscle contractions with its verbal feedback (bimodal). Children then completed a perceived social support questionnaire. Qualitative and quantitative data were subjected to inferential statistical tests. Results showed that the overall duration of agent-pupil interactions varied, children found the bimodal agent more empathic, and produced significantly more correct answers. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between accuracy and mean reaction times for correct answers with the bimodal agent. The lack of a correlation for the unimodal agent is discussed in the light of empathy and motivation in social cognition.
Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies.... more Excessive alcohol use among adolescents has become a pressing challenge among Western societies. Accordingly, one of the current research objectives is to identify the processes associated with this harmful habit. Although numerous studies have underlined the role of executive and motivational processes, few have explored emotional and interpersonal abilities at early steps of alcohol abuse. The present study evaluated the role of two social cognition processes, namely theory of mind (ability to infer others’ mental states at cognitive and affective levels) and empathy (ability to understand others’ feelings at cognitive and affective levels) in adolescents’ alcohol consumption. Two hundred and two adolescents (13-20 years old) performed a behavioral task evaluating theory of mind and filled in questionnaires measuring personal data, empathy, alcohol consumption (alcohol abuse and specific binge drinking), as well as depressive and anxiety symptoms. Findings showed that cognitive and affective empathy were negatively associated with alcohol consumption in youth whereas affective theory of mind was related to specific binge drinking. Importantly, affective theory of mind predicted binge drinking in adolescents, even after controlling for age, gender, and education level. These results emphasized the role of social cognition in early alcohol abuse and showed that, beyond inhibition, interpersonal abilities might precipitate excessive drinking in youth.
It is now largely accepted that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit to attribute mental st... more It is now largely accepted that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit to attribute mental states to others, such as intentions, needs and motivations but also to perform memory tasks. According to one hypothesis, these impairments may be due to an early visual attention deficit during the encounter of social stimuli. Another hypothesis posits a robust correlation between intention attribution and autobiographical memory that results in impaired recollection of past events making it difficult to infer others' intentions. In sum, the link between intention attribution and encoding process is yet to be explored in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the present study is to contribute to this debate by investigating whether schizophrenic patients' recollection can be boosted by an attentional cueing on relevant information and to determine the influence of two different situational contexts: attribution of intentions or physical causality scripts. By using a supraliminal attentional cue, we made relevant areas of our material more salient across two conditions: attribution of intentions (AI) and physical causality with human characters (PCCH). The results confirmed expected deficit of explicit memory in schizophrenia patients while attentional cueing on relevant areas for intentions attribution or physical causality had no effect on recollection in any group. However, it seems that the recollection performances are highly influenced by the nature of intentions attribution. Also, it is the first time that the material used for the assessment of theory of mind performances has been tested with a recognition test.
With regards to the neurocognitive deficits and cognitive bias of schizophrenic disorders, it may... more With regards to the neurocognitive deficits and cognitive bias of schizophrenic disorders, it may be hypothesized that these patients suffer a deficit in recognizing helping intentions in others. To inves- tigate help recognition, new technologies allowing to control an interaction with virtual affective agents were used with an adap- tation of a previously described card-guessing paradigm (project COMPARSE ANR-11-EMCO-0007). We investigated whether the same game proposed successively by two virtual agents asking either empathetic (i.e. on the subject’s feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game) questions to the participant would elicit different interpretations on their intentions. Depend- ent variables consisted of monetary allocation to the virtual agent, of questionnaires assessing the agent’s help, interest, attention, etc. A group of 20 individuals with schizophrenia and one of 20 healthy controls, matched on gender, with comparable age, esti- mated verbal-IQ and educational level were recruited.
La pratique psychiatrique est amenée à intégrer de plus en plus de moyens spécialisés d'évaluati... more La pratique psychiatrique est amenée à intégrer de plus en plus de moyens spécialisés d'évaluation des capacités cognitives des patients schizophrènes. Évaluer ces facultés revêt un intérêt tout particulier du fait de leurs corrélations significatives, même par-tielles, avec le pronostic fonctionnel, autrement dit le handicap. De plus, les mesures des capacités cognitives sont directement en lien avec les moyens de remédiation cognitive dont l'intérêt thérapeutique est établi. En tant que domaine particulier du trai-tement de l'information, un nombre croissant de travaux a mis en lumière les spécificités neurofonctionnelles des processus permet-tant de comprendre les états mentaux et affectifs d'autrui. Sous les intitulés de reconnaissance émotionnelle, perception sociale, représentations partagées, prise de perspective, théorie de l'esprit, ou empathie sont identifiés des processus et des représentations dont la faillite impacte les capacités relationnelles des patients. Au stade actuel des connaissances, il n'existe pas de consensus sur les moyens de mesure pertinents et leur éventuelle hiérar-chisation à des fins cliniques. Des propositions de batterie sont en cours d'évaluation et de déploiement. Pour aller plus avant, à l'encontre du réductionnisme scientifique prédominant, nous développons ici l'idée qu'aux côtés des évaluations fondées sur des mesures de construits cognitifs sociaux distincts et validés par les neurosciences sociales, de nouvelles méthodes sont à conce-voir pour tester les capacités d'interaction sociale. Une approche « naturalistique » fondée sur la multi-modalité, la contextualisation et la mise en situation est rendue possible avec le développement des techniques de réalité virtuelle. Celles-ci constituent une voie prometteuse pour concilier deux besoins scientifiques apparem-ment contradictoires : d'une part, le besoin de complexifier les stimuli sociaux en les rendant réalistes, interactifs, partiellement prévisibles, et immersifs, et d'autre part, le besoin d'assurer la répli-cabilité et la standardisation des mesures. Notre propos s'appuiera sur les résultats à mi-parcours du projet ANR COMPARSE.
Augmented feedback has been shown to improve interaction in virtual environments and to facilitat... more Augmented feedback has been shown to improve interaction in virtual environments and to facilitate motor learn- ing. Recent studies proposed this type of feedback to guide users, to highlight specific areas or to help them to perform a specific task. They can follow a path, pass through specific waypoints or even mimic an avatar. However these approaches do not show the gap between learners’ performance and the desired one. Our hypothesis is that by revealing this gap to the users, they will reduce it step by step and tend to the required performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new visual metaphor to guide trainees’ gestures by showing trajectory errors instead of showing the path to follow. In a first study we evaluated trainees’ improvement by measuring the mentioned gap. First results indicate that our approach allows an enhanced task performance. Keywords—Virtual reality, visual feedback, guidance, gestures
The present topic emphasizes the parallel development of concepts in social neurosciences and in ... more The present topic emphasizes the parallel development of concepts in social neurosciences and in other domains such as computer science, affective computing, virtual reality development, and even hardware technologies. While several researchers in neurosciences pointed out the necessity to consider naturalistic social cognition (Zaki and Ochsner, 2009), the second person perspective (Schilbach et al., 2013), social interaction (Pfeiffer et al.) and reciprocity (de Bruin et al.), both computer and software developments allowed more and more realistic real-time models of our environment and of virtual humans capable of some interaction with users. A new convergence between scientific disciplines might occur from which it is tricky to predict the outcomes in terms of new concepts, methods, and uses. Although this convergence meets ongoing societal changes (increasing social demands on computer technologies, augmenting funding), it comes with several difficulties for which the current Frontiers in' topic strives to bring some positive answers, and to provide both theoretical arguments and experimental examples. The first problem was about concepts and vocabulary as contributions described in the following were authored by neuroscientists, computer scientists, psychopathologists, each coming with separate knowledge, and key literature. A special attention was given to avoid purely technical descriptions and to focus on the added value of virtual reality in neurosciences and psychopathology. Another problem concerned methods: more complex computerized interaction models results in unpredictable and poorly controlled experiments. In other words, the assets of naturalistic paradigms may be alleviated by the difficulty to match results between subjects, populations, and conditions. It is crucial to consider this question when investigating pathologies that are associated with profoundly divergent behavioral patterns. The last issue we encountered was about heterogeneity of the objectives of the researches presented here. While selection criteria focused on the use of innovative technologies to assess or improve social cognition, the fields of application of this approach were quite unexpected. The first group of contributions exemplifies how innovation in methods improves understanding and assessment of social cognition disorders or pathology. Timmermans and Schilbach provide technological orientations for investigating alterations of social interaction in
The need for experimentation of facial expression recognition in a more ecological manner necessi... more The need for experimentation of facial expression recognition in a more ecological manner necessitates the use of multimodal, interactive experimental stimuli. At the same time, the prerequisite of reproducibility of results and controlled conditions is still mandatory. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) is a pertinent framework that meets all these requirements. The VIB (Virtual Interactive Behavior) Platform is a SAIBA compliant system which supports the real-time generation of multimodal behavior for interacting with socio-emotional virtual agents. We created a new feature for this platform, namely VIB-Ex, which can be used for presenting real-time facial expressions and recording the user's reaction time and interaction while exporting data for statistical purposes. In this paper, we present our proof of concept study in which a 3D male virtual character has been used to convey joyful or sad facial expressions. At the same time, the same character pronounced joyful or sad words in congruence or incongruence with its facial expression in order to trigger an emotional Stroop effect. Only 12 adults were sufficient in order to obtain an emotional Stroop effect within our virtual agent. The results of this study confirmed that the VIB-Ex platform can replicate a robust effect of psychological phenomena concerning recognition of facial expressions. VIB-Ex proves itself to be a suitable and a pertinent tool to perform experiments on a human's automatic process of facial expression recognition. Finally, we discuss the possible future research topics with VIB-Ex to carry out other type of experiments in the field of social cognition.
Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases.... more Individuals with schizophrenia are impaired in their neurocognition and present cognitive biases. These impairments may lead to a deficit in recognizing helping intentions of others. To investigate recognition of help, we designed a card-guessing game (Virtual Help Recognition Paradigm) involving two successive virtual agents asking questions to the participant at different moments of the game. These questions were either empathetic (i.e. on the subject's feelings) or non-empathetic (i.e. on technical aspects of the game). We assessed how much the participant felt that the virtual agent had helped him and, her attitude and personality traits. We measured how much the participant trusted the virtual agent with a monetary allocation procedure. Twenty individuals with schizophrenia and twenty healthy controls were recruited. The controls' ratings demonstrated that they interpreted empathetic questioning as helping and rewarded it positively with an increased monetary allocation. Participants with schizophrenia had a reduced perception of the differences between the two agents. Only the rating concerning the " interest/ attention " of the agent toward these participants yielded significant differences among conditions. Hypothetically , individuals with schizophrenia take into account the fact they are the object of another's attention, but may fail to infer a helping intention and to behave accordingly.
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Papers by Ali Oker
processing. To date, such studies have largely focused on approaches that use static emotional stimuli that the participant
has to identify passively without the possibility of any interaction. In this study, we propose an interactive virtual
environment to better address age-related variations in social and emotional perception. A group of 22 young (18–30
years) and 20 older (60–80 years) adults were engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an embodied conversational
agent. Participants were invited to interact naturally with the agent and to identify his facial expression. Their gaze
behaviour was captured by an eye-tracking device throughout the interaction. We also explored whether the Big Five
personality traits (particularly extraversion) and anxiety modulated gaze during the social interaction. Findings suggested
that age-related differences in gaze behaviour were only apparent when decoding social signals (i.e., listening to a
partner’s question, identifying facial expressions) and not when communicating social information (i.e., when speaking).
Furthermore, higher extraversion levels consistently led to a shorter amount of time gazing towards the eyes, whereas
higher anxiety levels led to slight modulations of gaze only when participants were listening to questions. Face-to-face
conversation with virtual agents can provide a more naturalistic framework for the assessment of online socio-emotional
interaction in older adults, which is not easily observable in classical offline paradigms. This study provides novel and
important insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may experience difficulties in social interactions.
Keywords—Virtual reality, visual feedback, guidance, gestures
processing. To date, such studies have largely focused on approaches that use static emotional stimuli that the participant
has to identify passively without the possibility of any interaction. In this study, we propose an interactive virtual
environment to better address age-related variations in social and emotional perception. A group of 22 young (18–30
years) and 20 older (60–80 years) adults were engaged in a face-to-face conversation with an embodied conversational
agent. Participants were invited to interact naturally with the agent and to identify his facial expression. Their gaze
behaviour was captured by an eye-tracking device throughout the interaction. We also explored whether the Big Five
personality traits (particularly extraversion) and anxiety modulated gaze during the social interaction. Findings suggested
that age-related differences in gaze behaviour were only apparent when decoding social signals (i.e., listening to a
partner’s question, identifying facial expressions) and not when communicating social information (i.e., when speaking).
Furthermore, higher extraversion levels consistently led to a shorter amount of time gazing towards the eyes, whereas
higher anxiety levels led to slight modulations of gaze only when participants were listening to questions. Face-to-face
conversation with virtual agents can provide a more naturalistic framework for the assessment of online socio-emotional
interaction in older adults, which is not easily observable in classical offline paradigms. This study provides novel and
important insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may experience difficulties in social interactions.
Keywords—Virtual reality, visual feedback, guidance, gestures